The Girl in the Clockwork Collar

Page 33

“I am very pleased that you deigned to allow me to study you, Your Grace,” Tesla said in his soft tone. “I expect to learn many wonderful things from you.”
“It is no trouble, sir. I thank you for allowing me to practice Aetherically controlling the machines you’ve designed.” If it would help him take out Dalton and his machine, it was worth being treated like an experiment. He frowned when he noticed the inventor’s strange clothing. “Whatever are you wearing?”
Tesla spread his arms so that both Emily and Griffin might admire him. He wore a bizarre one-piece suit, which enveloped him from head to toe. Valves, switches and several telephone dials covered the torso of it, while wires and coiled tubing connected to the hood, out to the arms and down the legs. He also held a mask in his hand—one that was designed to cover the face—but he had attached a hose to it, which was attached at the other end to a small metal canister.
“I call it my Aetheric Mortality Disambiguation Suit.”
Griffin stared at him. Even Emily seemed at a loss for words. “Are you saying that this thing will kill you?”
“Almost,” the genius replied with uncharacteristic glee. “I constructed it immediately after our last meeting. It will drop all of my body’s functions to the brink of death and, therefore, fool the Aether so that I may see what you see.”
Griffin nodded, still not quite believing his ears. “It makes you a ghost.”
“Exactly, Your Grace! Exactly.”
Griffin and Emily exchanged a glance. He didn’t want to insult Tesla, but the suit was one of the most foolhardy devices he’d ever heard of. Inviting death was never the intelligent choice, no matter how bloody smart you were. “Mr. Tesla, that sounds very dangerous.”
“Oh, no, it’s quite safe. And we will have Miss O’Brien here to assist should any complications arise.”
Emily paled just enough that her freckles stood out against her cheeks. “Of course,” she said, but it was obvious she didn’t want the responsibility of making certain Tesla stayed alive, though she would do everything in her power to make certain he did just that.
“Mr. Tesla, sir,” Emily began. “You said a person wouldn’t have to be holding your machine to work it, correct?”
“Yes. The device is designed to focus on a specific target. Your villain could do that most easily from anywhere with a clear view.”
“What if there were multiple targets?” Griffin asked. “Say, if he wanted to render more than one item intangible?”
Tesla looked dismayed. “I designed it so that it could be used Aetherically using what I call radio waves. If he also has the controller or has made one, he could leave the device anywhere within range and simply activate the controller in the direction of whatever he wished to move through.”
Griffin raked a hand through his hair. “Wonderful.”
“However, he could not use the machine on more than one target at a time. He would have to wait at least five seconds for the charge to build once more.”
If he had been standing by a wall, Griffin would have banged his head against it.
“On the bright side,” Emily piped up, “is that, even if you can’t pinpoint the machine itself, you may be able to disable the device by focusing on the controller.”
“Very true,” Tesla agreed. “Miss O’Brien, you are most certainly the most intelligent female I have ever met.”
Griffin bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. For a second, Emily looked as though she didn’t know whether to be flattered or offended.
“Thank you, sir,” she said with a tight smile. “Shall we get started?”
Poor Emily, Griffin thought. She had been so excited to meet Tesla, but the man hadn’t turned out to be exactly what she had hoped for. There was no denying the inventor was brilliant, and he had been fairly polite and considerate, but there was something slightly cracked about him, and his fascination with the military applications of his various devices was … creepy.
Regardless of his eccentricity, he was the only person who could help them at the moment.
Tesla walked to a chair, which looked like the sort one would find at a barber’s, and sat down. “Miss O’Brien, would you be so kind as to assist me?”
Griffin watched as Emily helped the inventor slip on the mask and stored the metal cylinder where it wouldn’t fall. Then she strapped him to the arm and leg rests. Tesla’s breathing could be heard throughout the room as he sucked the gas from the cylinder into his lungs. Emily flicked the switches and dialed a series of numbers on each of the dials. Then she took a long cable connected to what appeared to be a modified radio/etching machine, only instead of brass cylinders, the arm of the etcher held a pencil over a length of paper stretched between two rolls. She slipped the small, flexible disk at the end of the cable onto Tesla’s temple, beneath the snug hood of his suit.
“What does that do?” Griffin asked.
“It monitors his heart rate,” she replied. “I’m to revive him if it drops too low.”
“What’s too low?”
She gave him a wry smile. “If it stops completely.”
“Ah.” He glanced at Tesla, who was rendered deaf by his helmet and the sound of his own breathing. “Am I the only one who thinks this is quite possibly insane?”
Emily shook her head. “Not at all. Although, if this works, I may be able to modify the design so that I can also observe you in the Aether.”
Griffin frowned. “Why would you want to do that?” He didn’t bother to add that there was no bloody way he’d allow her to risk her life out of scientific curiosity.
She blinked—as though the answer should be obvious. “Why wouldn’t I?”
He laughed. “Because it’s dangerous.”
A shrug of her shoulders dismissed his concerns. She consulted the etching apparatus. “All right, his heart has slowed to almost nothing. Do you see his Aetheric projection?”
What a lovely term for a living ghost. Griffin had never sought the living in the Aether before, and the last time he’d encountered such a phenomenon it hadn’t gone well.
He relaxed his hold on this world and opened himself up to the Aether. Some referred to the sight as having a “third eye” and it certainly made sense. It was as though he was seeing a new layer of the world on top of what was already there, as if reality was a glass slide in a microscope and the Aether was simply another set on top.
When the Aetheric plane came into focus, its gray and washed-out gauziness settling, Tesla’s spirit stood beside the chair where his body reclined. Even in this realm, he wore the suit, made slightly less ridiculous by the sheer fact that it worked.
“How very extraordinary,” the inventor remarked, jaw slack in awe as he glanced about the mist.
“I suppose it is,” Griffin replied. He had been able to see the Aether for most of his life, so it didn’t hold the same wonder for him. “You set an Aether conductive device in motion before we arrived, correct?”
“Yes, of course. I hid it somewhere within these rooms. Can you sense it?”
“Not yet.” He hadn’t even tried. “Just give me a moment.” First, he looked around to see if anything looked or felt wrong or out of place. There was Emily standing beside Tesla’s body—the man’s spirit was right beside her, and she couldn’t see him, which was just as well, seeing that Tesla kept trying to poke her.
Griffin could tell him that he would never, ever make contact, but then the inventor might want to talk to him, and that would slow down this process. They didn’t have that much time. The Historical Society event at the Museum of Science and Invention was in a matter of days.
He wondered what sort of gown Finley would buy. He should get her a suit. The way she looked in his clothes last evening … That wasn’t the sort of thing he should let distract him, either, nor her not-so-cryptic promise that he would trust her eventually. He turned his head, and that’s when he saw it.
Along the ceiling, there drifted a small wisp of churning energy. Its color was a little different than normal Aetheric energy. It had a slightly reddish cast to it, as though it would be hot to the touch. He knew—felt it in his gut—that this particular signature belonged to Tesla’s machine, but he couldn’t remember if he had seen a similar shade around the previous machine he had shut down. Of course, he had been too preoccupied with the shadow-thing that had attacked him.
He wasn’t going to think about that right now, either.
He probably didn’t have to actually hold up his hand, but it gave him direction and focus if he reached out toward the energy he sought to control. He pointed his fingers at the reddish wisp and willed it to come to him.
The energy came easily—it was Aether, after all. He gripped it—an intangible rope that hummed in his hand— and slowly took it as his own, letting the warmth of it seep through his skin, into his bones.
Griffin closed his eyes. It felt good, this surge of power. It was like a hot shower or lying in the sun. It filled him with peace and contentment, as though he was a well that had been allowed to run dry and was now filling with rain.
When he opened his eyes again, he knew that he held the control of Tesla’s machine. He felt its location—in the wardrobe in the bedroom—and concentrated on taking the energy away from it. In a way, his mind was like one of Tesla’s radio controllers, shutting the device down without touching it. He simply cut off the power running to and from it.
It hadn’t been difficult at all, he thought with a smile. As he turned to comment to Tesla, he heard a cry of pain. All of his pleasure at having so easily shut down the machine fled, replaced by horror as he saw the reason for that cry.
Tesla’s spirit had been slashed—ripped—by a black mass that was almost entirely shapeless, except for long black claws.
Griffin’s heart froze in his chest. For a split second, he was unable to do anything as fear rendered him immobile.
He didn’t want to go near that thing. Neither could he allow it to harm Tesla.
“Emily,” he yelled. “Wake him up.”
“What?” She looked up at him, then back at Tesla, just as the inventor’s body began to thrash against the restraints. “Mary and Joseph!” She began working the dials and switches on the suit in an attempt to bring Tesla’s soul back to his body.
It would take more time than the inventor had. Thoughts of his own mortality vanished as Griffin bolted toward the inky mass. God only knew how ridiculous he looked to Emily, tearing across the room to deal with an unseen enemy. A potentially lethal unseen enemy.
Tesla’s spirit was trying to fight the thing off while simultaneously trying to protect itself. Deep slashes marked his chest, arm and face. Much more of this and the older man would die for real.
Griffin put himself between Tesla and the mass. He just had to distract the thing until Emily succeeded in her task.
The first swipe of claws tore through his jacket and waistcoat but not his flesh. The second, he managed to duck and avoid. A low rumbling noise came from deep inside the blackness, as though coming from deep within an old well. Was that … laughter?
“What the bloody hell?” he demanded, arching back to avoid another swipe. The thing was laughing at him. What was it?
It was something he had to get rid of.
“Go back,” he said to it. “Go back where you belong, or I swear on my father’s grave, I will end you.”
The mass seemed to take umbrage at that and drew itself upward. It stretched at least a foot over the top of Griffin’s head. For a moment, it looked as though it almost had a face, but then it was gone.
It had to be a ghost, but how? Why? That didn’t matter now.
“Go back,” he said again, turning his hands palms up at his sides and extending them ever so slightly to begin calling his own power. He could feel it slowly warming up his veins, tingling in his fingertips. The mass hadn’t corrupted the entire Aether, just the part it occupied.
The thick, oily strands wavered but didn’t flee. Claws reformed, drawing back to deliver another blow. Griffin set his jaw and thrust both hands out, sinking them wrist deep into the entity before releasing the energy he had summoned.
The thing screamed—sounding like a cross between the caw of a crow and a rusted hinge—before blowing apart like kicked sand.
Griffin stood there for a moment, waiting to see if it came back. When it didn’t, he let the Aetheric dimension slip away, leaving nothing but the world of the living around him.
“Is Tesla all right?” he demanded as he turned toward Emily.
“Quite,” the older man replied. He was sitting up now, and had removed his mask and hood. He looked tired and shaky. “Thanks to you, Your Grace.”